


A Voice Buried in the Hollow

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Footage Not Found [14]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:39:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3536576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the storm, Daryl sits with the broken music box. He hates it. It's all wrong. But it means something to Maggie. And Beth would want him to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Voice Buried in the Hollow

**Author's Note:**

> More prompts. If you've noticed that I'm posting EVERY GODDAMN DAY it's because I'm on vacation so I'm writing up a storm.

He’s exhausted.

But that’s nothing new. He’s been exhausted for weeks. There are times now - and they aren’t so infrequent anymore - where he thinks he’s been exhausted since the crossroads, exhausted since he ran for her, all those hours lost to his heart and his legs and the air clawing its way in and out of his lungs. He thought he knew what it meant to be tired and then chasing her, trying to reach her, trying to find her, telling himself over and over and over that it could be done…

That taught him. That taught him some serious fucking lessons. And since then he hasn’t stopped learning. About exhaustion.

About pain.

He would really, really like to stop learning about that. He thinks he knows just about all he wants to know, all he’ll ever need to. He has the kind of appreciation for pain that some people claim to have for wine. Body and bouquet and finish. It’s pathetic, he can practically hear Merle telling him to stop feeling so fucking sorry for himself, but he isn’t feeling sorry for himself. He isn’t at all. He feels no pity for himself whatsoever. He doesn’t feel much of anything. He doesn’t even really feel the pain. He’s just aware, in a dim kind of way, that he’s in it. That it’s in him. Soaked. Like the rain.

Less, now. The burn on his hand is scabbing over. He understands that even that will heal.

The rain is also over. He sort of misses it. Not the water but the regularity. Once the walkers were gone it was vaguely comforting. That consistent drumbeat. They all collapsed, one after the other, when they were sure it was safe, and retired to their separate corners and curled up and dropped away from the world. He watched them, slumped against the wall, and if he didn’t sleep he could claim that someone had to keep watch and he was pretty sure they’d leave him alone. They know enough to do that by now.

Even Rick would probably back off.

But no one asked him.

He sits and he feels exhausted and he’s not even all that sure when he last slept, and he can’t remember whether or not he dreamed. With Beth, running then, he would let her take watch - because she insisted and because he had to concede in the end that it was only practical - and he would plunge into the darkness and have the most wildly psychedelic dreams he’s ever had: mad, rushing things full of violent colors and noises like nothing he’s ever heard before. Twisted, morphing faces - some known and some completely unfamiliar. Animals capering and dancing and he would try to hunt them with a bow that turned into a hawk in his hand and rocketed up to soar on the thermals. Spirals of painted words winding themselves around trees like snakes. Mountains rising and sinking away into endless spiked oceans.

Her voice, singing. Always. She never spoke to him in those dreams. She only sang.

She doesn’t sing anymore.

So he has this fucking music box.

He hasn’t told anyone - certainly hasn’t told Maggie - that he hates the thing. Can’t stand the sight of it. Not because it reminds him of her but because it _doesn’t_. It doesn’t fit her. At all. It’s this pretty little delicate thing, some shit from a little girl’s bedroom, and he likes kids, likes pretty much all kids in general without regard to any real differences between them, and nothing whatsoever against little girls, because little girls… God, they should be little girls while they can, before the world grinds them up. All little kids, being kids. Before they die and start walking around.

But that wasn’t Beth. She wasn’t a little girl. She wasn't a little kid. If he ever saw her that way, she cured him of that. She wasn’t this pretty little delicate _artifact_. She was…

He thought about trying to talk to Maggie about it, back when it was still raw and bleeding and he wanted to spill it out of him like pus out of a wound, or get it off his back like this shit he had been carrying around since she was taken and not able to tell anyone. There was too much. It hurt too bad. Everything he felt, wanted, had hoped for, had been stupid enough to think he might have. He thought maybe if he could tell anyone it would be Maggie - what her sister had really been like, what he saw and what she showed him and what she had done for him, how she saved him in more ways than he could ever explain. Tell her things, and in telling her, maybe tell himself. Maybe make some things clearer.

Like how she was this wild thing, how when they ran and stopped living and started just surviving she seemed like this beautiful bright little creature, something between a deer and a bird and a living flame. Bright, brilliant, even filthy and tired and angry at him. Maybe even especially when she was angry at him. How sometimes he _tried_ to make her angry just to see that spark in her, warm himself by it. How she was so graceful when she ran, how even when they were sprinting for their lives he saw it and marked it and admired it, and it helped him run a little faster. How she did sing, then, or she sang after the moonshine and the fire, and he never told her but it was everything. It was everything.

She was everything. He wanted to tell Maggie that. Wanted her to know.

She was tough and she was strong and she was ruthless and she was terrifying and she was the most beautiful thing he ever saw and he would have cheerfully died for her, gone to whatever end with a smile on his face.

He would have died for her and he’ll wish forever that he could have had that chance.

He wanted to tell Maggie that. But somehow, even if he could have found the words - and maybe it’s unfair - he just doesn’t know if she would have understood.

So she had that music box, and it was broken. Which he thought was the height of irony. Now she’s asleep and he has it, turning it over in his hands in the dim morning light, gray light of after-storm dawn. He’s so tired, but he can’t sleep, because he has this music box and it’s broken, and he hates it but there were all those things he wanted to tell Maggie…

And something is awake in him.

Tiny. Quiet. He doesn’t even know what it is. But it’s there.

Something was broken.

He took the box. He’s not even sure why. Now he picks it up and looks at it, opens the lid, stares for a while at the little ballerina. Hands over her head, caught in an eternal pirouette. This is another problem: she won’t move. Even when she’s turning, she’ll just turn in place.

This isn’t dancing.

He touches her arms, turns her. Something in him wrenches and cracks open. And he doesn’t cry, not again, but he drops the box between his knees and leans his head back and all that gray light turns to a gray blur.

He can’t tell Maggie. He can’t tell anyone. What she was really like. What he saw. What she showed him, what she gave him. He can’t.

But he has this, and even if it’s not her, even if it’s not right, even if it’s all wrong and it’s a lie and he hates it…

He can still do this. He could. Or he can at least try.

She would want him to try.

He crosses his legs, puts the box in his lap, and starts - very carefully - to take it apart.

And he sees the pieces. The inner workings. Surprisingly intricate, all those little elements that make it run, complex. Logical; he can see how they all fit together, how they make sense. He sinks into it, fits himself into its spaces. It’s something he can work out, see how it has to run, and he can see the problem…

And he can see how to fix it.

That part is actually very simple.

This won’t fix anything, not really. It’s not right. It’s not her. It’s a lie, and he’ll never be able to explain why, or how he knows. But he closes it back up again and looks at the little dancer, and he thinks about a real dancer and he focuses on the strength under that delicacy. How strong she would have to be to hold that pose, if she was real. How strong she would have to be to move, turn, leap and hurl herself and fall with such exquisite control, and get up again. Always get up again.

He touches her, and she turns. And he can see it. He can.

He closes it, sets it down, and stares at nothing. So tired. And still soaked in pain like water.

But now he’s starting to think that if he tries, like she would want, and he pays very close attention…

If he can do that, maybe he’ll start to see her everywhere.

And that could be all right.

Might not even hurt so much. Someday.


End file.
